For a colour laser printer, anything approaching the £300 mark seems to count as relatively expensive. But the Oki C3300 manages to justify its £280 price tag with its full network facilities.

At 21kg, the Oki isn't the lightest colour laser available, despite some rather slender dimensions. It's certainly not as tall as some lasers we've seen, although we would have accepted a little extra height had it given the Oki a more substantial paper tray.

The hardware resolution of 1,200x600 is superior to much of the competition – although it is matched by the older Oki C3200 – and 32MB of RAM is fairly decent as a default. The C3300n has an ethernet interface and USB compatibility.

So far, so good. Better still, the Oki offers some good image quality. Text is handled particularly well, with character definition very sharp and results dark and vivid. Colour graphics are also eyecatching.

We would query whether the colour palette is totally accurate – often the shades were just a little too bold compared with the subject matter. Nonetheless, the results are brimming in vibrancy. And if you want to get your point across in a presentation, a touch more colour probably doesn't go amiss.

If the Oki does have a drawback, though, it's in the matter of speed. The quoted figures of 16ppm (pages per minute) for mono and 12ppm for colour printing are hardly sensational. And in our real-world printing, the mono figure dropped to a mere 12.5ppm – even the £239 Canon LBP5200 offers more than this. Colour was better, although 7.5ppm is hardly class-topping.

The Oki does most things well. It has good network capabilities as standard and its text output is particularly dashing. However, general speed isn't quite as good as it should be, and the running costs aren't the lowest we've seen.